September 22, 2026
Competition for local AI models heats up: Alibaba Cloud gave Omarchy $3 million
On September 22, Alibaba Cloud committed $3 million to the Omacom Foundation and agreed to develop Omarchy China and adapt the system for Qwen Book. Omarchy already installs local models via Install > AI: the project offers LM Studio and Ollama.
Gergely Orosz
@gergelyorosz
It always seemed that local models on developers' laptops would arrive not "if," but "when." It's great to see competition broadening: Linux, Omarchy and, from what I hear, Windows will enter the field too. Who knows, maybe this will finally push Apple to do something! Or it will lose market share.
Thrilled to announce @alibaba_cloud as a Founding Corporate Patron for the Omacom Foundation! $3 million in funding, collaboration on Omarchy China, and bringing Omarchy to the newly announced Qwen Book. Agentic computers need a native agentic OS! https://omarchy.org/news/2026/09/alibaba-cloud-joins-as-founding-corporate-patron/
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In October 2025, Canonical launched one-command local installation of DeepSeek R1 and Qwen 2.5 VL for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Now Omarchy 4.0.4 offers LM Studio as a starting point through the Install > AI menu, with Ollama available there too.
The barrier is falling. Omarchy lets users write an ISO to USB and answer 5 questions. The project promises installation in under 2 minutes on most computers.
Microsoft says it will begin selling the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box in the US later in 2026: the device is designed to run 120B+ models locally with a 1 million-token context window.
